Nigel Farage used the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement as the counter-argument to predictions that it would take 5-10 years to negotiate a UK-USA FTA.

His assertion is that it had taken just 10 months to negotiate the US-Australia FTA. Let’s look at it:

It is true that the actual commercial negotiation did only take 10 months using the North American FTA as a model

What he fails to mention is that the US had been trying to get such an agreement since the 1980’s, and when agreement in principle was reached in 2001, it took until 2003 for negotiations to start, and until 2005 for both countries to ratify.